neo4j merge 2 or multiple duplicate nodes - neo4j

I am feeding my neo4j db manually using cypher, so prone to error like creating duplicate nodes:
The duplicate nodes will have each relationships to other nodes.
Is there a built-in function to merge these nodes? Or should I do it manually?
Sounds possible, but complicated with cypher script:
Get the relationships of each duplicate node
Recreate them (with their properties) with the correct node (given node id)
Remove relationships to the duplicate nodes
and finally remove the duplicate nodes.

To avoid this situation in the future, please look at the MERGE keyword in Cypher.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is nothing in Cypher (yet) like:
MATCH (n:MyNode),(m:MyNode)
WHERE ID(n) <> ID(m) AND
PROPS(n) IN PROPS(m) AND PROPS(m) IN PROPS(n)
(...) DELETE (...)
The fictional function PROPS of the third line is not part of Cypher language and User-Defined functions have not made it yet into Neo4j.
If you're not working with production instances, the easiest is probably to back up your data folder and try to start the insertion over (with MERGE).
Otherwise, you can also try writing a traversal to collect the duplicates and delete them in batch (here is an example with the REST API).

Try this:
MATCH (n:MyNode),(m:MyNode),(o:OtherNode {id:123})
WHERE n <> m
MATCH (m)-[r:FOO]->()
CREATE (n)-[r2:FOO]->(o)
SET r2 = r
DELETE r,m

I think you can try:
apoc.refactor.mergeNodes(nodes, options)
For relations:
apoc.refactor.mergeRelationships(rels, options)
Or:
apoc.periodic.iterate(query, options)

Related

query to copy a node with relations in neo4j without the clone procedure

I want to copy a node with all its properties and relations with others nodes. Im using Neo4j version 3.4.7 so I can't use the clone procedure. My node might have different types of relations and I want to copy them all. I wanted to use this query
match (map:student {name:'test'})
create (copy:student) set copy=map with copy,map
match (map)-[r1]->(n)
with collect(r1) as rels,map,copy,n
foreach( rel in rels | create (copy)-[r2:type(rel)]->(n) set r2+=rel)
return copy,n
but I get invalid syntax error using type(rel) in foreach. Is there a way to do this without knowing the types of relations?
The easiest way is to install the APOC library, and call the procedure apoc.refactor.cloneNodesWithRelationships, as documented here.
In your case, your query would become:
MATCH (map:student {name:'test'})
CALL apoc.refactor.cloneNodesWithRelationships([map])
Note: node labels usually start with an upper letter (Student is more common than student in Neo4j datasets).

Traverse both incoming and outgoing relationship in Cypher

I am new at Neo4j but not to graphs and I have a specific problem I did not manage to solve with Cypher.
With this type of data:
I would like to be able in a single query to follow some incoming and some outgoing flow.
Example:
Starting on "source"
Follow all "A" relationships in the outgoing way
Follow all "B" relationships in the incoming way
My problem is that Cypher only allows one single direction to be specified in the relationship pattern.
So I could do (source)-[:A|:B*]->() or (source)<-[:A|:B*]-().
But I have no possibility to tell Cypher that I want to follow -[:A]-> and <-[:B]-.
By the way, I know that I could do -[:A|:B]- but this won't solve my problem because I don't want to follow -[:B]-> and <-[:A]-.
Thanks in advance for your help :)
Alternatively to #Gabor Szarnyas answer, I think you can achieve your goal using the APOC procedure apoc.path.expand.
Using this sample data set:
CREATE (:Source)-[:A]->()-[:A]->()<-[:B]-()-[:A]->()
And calling apoc.path.expand:
match (source:Source)
call apoc.path.expand(source,"A>|<B","",0,5) yield path
return path
You will get this path as output:
The apoc.path.expand call starts from the source node following -[:A]-> and <-[:B]- relationships.
Remember to install APOC procedures according to the version of Neo4j you are using. Take a look in the version compatibility matrix.
To express this in a single query would require a regular path query, which has been proposed to and accepted to openCypher, but it is not yet implemented.
I see two possible workarounds. I recreated your example with this command with a Source label for the source node:
CREATE (:Source)-[:A]->()-[:A]->()<-[:B]-()-[:A]->()
(1) Insert additional relationships that have the same direction:
MATCH (s)-[:B]->(t)
CREATE (s)<-[:B2]-(t)
And use this relationship for traversal:
MATCH p=(source)-[:A|:B2*]->()
RETURN p
(2) As you mentioned:
By the way, I know that I could do -[:A|:B]- but this won't solve my problem because I don't want to follow -[:B]-> and <-[:A]-.
You could use this approach to first get potential path candidates and manually check the directions of the relationships afterwards. Of course, this is an expensive operation but you only have to calculate it on the candidates, a possibly small data set.
MATCH p=(source:Source)-[:A|:B*]-()
WITH p, nodes(p) AS nodes, relationships(p) AS rels
WHERE all(i IN range(0, size(rels) - 1) WHERE
CASE type(rels[i])
WHEN 'A' THEN startNode(rels[i]) = nodes[i]
ELSE /* B */ startNode(rels[i]) = nodes[i+1]
END)
RETURN p
Let's break down how this works:
We store path candidates in p and use the nodes and relationships functions to extract the lists of nodes/relationships from it.
We define a range of indexes for the relationships (e.g. from 0, 1, 2 if there are 3 relationships).
To determine the direction of relationships, we use the startNode function. For example, if there is a relationship r between nodes n1 to n2, the paths will like <n1, r, n2>. If r was traversed to in the outgoing direction, the startNode(r) will return n1, if it was traverse in the incoming direction, startNode(r) will return n2. The type of the relationship is checked with the type function and a simple CASE expression is used to differentiate between types.
The WHERE clause uses the all predicate function to check whether all :A and :B relationships had the appropriate directions.

Cypher query fails with variable length paths when trying to find all paths with unique node occurences

I have a highly interconnected graph where starting from a specific node
i want to find all nodes connected to it regardless of the relation type, direction or length. What i am trying to do is to filter out paths that include a node more than 1 times. But what i get is a
Neo.DatabaseError.General.UnknownError: key not found: UNNAMED27
I have managed to create a much simpler database
in neo4j sandbox and get the same message again using the following data:
CREATE (n1:Person { pid:1, name: 'User1'}),
(n2:Person { pid:2, name: 'User2'}),
(n3:Person { pid:3, name: 'User3'}),
(n4:Person { pid:4, name: 'User4'}),
(n5:Person { pid:5, name: 'User5'})
With the following relationships:
MATCH (n1{pid:1}),(n2{pid:2}),(n3{pid:3}),(n4{pid:4}),(n5{pid:5})
CREATE (n1)-[r1:RELATION]->(n2),
(n5)-[r2:RELATION]->(n2),
(n1)-[r3:RELATION]->(n3),
(n4)-[r4:RELATION]->(n3)
The Cypher Query that causes this issue in the above model is
MATCH p= (n:Person{pid:1})-[*0..]-(m)
WHERE ALL(c IN nodes(p) WHERE 1=size(filter(d in nodes(p) where c.pid = d.pid)) )
return m
Can anybody see what is wrong with this query?
The error seems like a bug to me. There is a closed neo4j issue that seems similar, but it was supposed to be fixed in version 3.2.1. You should probably create a new issue for it, since your comments state you are using 3.2.5.
Meanwhile, this query should get the results you seem to want:
MATCH p=(:Person{pid:1})-[*0..]-(m)
WITH m, NODES(p) AS ns
UNWIND ns AS n
WITH m, ns, COUNT(DISTINCT n) AS cns
WHERE SIZE(ns) = cns
return m
You should strongly consider putting a reasonable upper bound on your variable-length path search, though. If you do not do so, then with any reasonable DB size your query is likely to take a very long time and/or run out of memory.
When finding paths, Cypher will never visit the same node twice in a single path. So MATCH (a:Start)-[*]-(b) RETURN DISTINCT b will return all nodes connected to a. (DISTINCT here is redundant, but it can affect query performance. Use PROFILE on your version of Neo4j to see if it cares and which is better)
NOTE: This works starting with Neo4j 3.2 Cypher planner. For previous versions of
the Cypher planner, the only performant way to do this is with APOC, or add a -[:connected_to]-> relation from start node to all children so that path doesn't have to be explored.)

Neo4J Cypher - Case Insensitive MERGE

Is there a way to do a case insensitive MERGE in Cypher (Neo4J)?
I'm creating a graph of entities I have been able to extract from a set of documents, and want to merge entities that are the same across multiple documents (accepting the risk that the same name doesn't mean it's the same entity!). The issue is that the case can vary between documents.
At the moment, I'm using the MERGE syntax to create merged nodes, but it is sensitive to the differences in case. How can I perform a case-insensitive merge?
There is no direct way but you can try out something like below.MERGE is made for pattern matching and labels of different cases constitute different patterns
MERGE (a:Crew123)
WITH a,labels(a) AS t
LIMIT 1
MATCH (n)
WHERE [l IN labels(n)
WHERE lower(l)=lower(t[0])] AND a <> n
WITH a,collect(n) AS s
FOREACH (x IN s |
DELETE a)
RETURN *
The above query will give you an ERROR but it will delete the newly created node if a similar label exists. You can add additional pattern in the MERGE clause . And in case there are no similar labels it will run successfully.
Again this is just a work around to not allow new similar labels.
If the data is coming for instance from a CSV or similar source (parameter) you can use a dedicated, consistent case property for the merge and set the original value separately.
e.g.
CREATE CONSTRAINT ON (u:User) ASSERT u.iname IS UNIQUE;
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "http://some/url" AS line
WITH line, lower(line.name) as iname
MERGE (u:User {iname:iname}) ON CREATE SET u.name = line.name;
The best solution we found was to change our schema to include a labelled node that contains the upper-cased value which we can merge on, whilst still retaining the case information on the original mode. E.g. (OriginalCase)-[uppercased]->(ORIGINALCASE)

How to make WITH Neo4J Cypher 2 query more efficient?

I had a query of this kind, which would basically find a specific node "Statement", find all the nodes connected to it with an :OF relation, find all their connections to one another, as well all the relations of the node "Statement" to other nodes and the node "Statement" itself:
MATCH (s:Statement{uid:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}),
c1-[:OF]->s<-[:OF]-c2, c1-[to:TO]->c2
WITH DISTINCT to, c1, c2, s
MATCH c1-[by:BY]->u, c2-[at:AT]->ctx
WHERE to.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
AND by.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
AND at.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
DELETE s,rel,to,by,at;
This worked OK for when there was 3 nodes connected to the node "Statement", but when there's a 100, it crashes the database.
I tried playing around passing different nodes and relationships with a WITH, but it didn't help.
The closest to a solution that I could get was to set up automatic indexing on relationship properties and then execute the deletion with two queries:
MATCH (s:Statement{uid:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}),
s-[by:BY]->u, s-[in:IN]->ctx, c-[of:OF]->s DELETE by,in,of,s;
START rel=relationship:relationship_auto_index
(statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878")
DELETE rel;
2 Questions:
1) I know that the first query took too long because there were too many iterations. How to avoid that?
2) Do you know how to combine the two faster queries above into one so that it works fast and preferably without using the relationship index and START clause?
Thank you!
For this statement
You must not separate the condition on to from the match. Then Cypher will find all matches first and only filter after it is done with that.
MATCH (s:Statement{uid:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}),
c1-[:OF]->s<-[:OF]-c2, c1-[to:TO]->c2
WHERE to.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
WITH DISTINCT to, c1, c2, s
MATCH c1-[by:BY]->u, c2-[at:AT]->ctx
WHERE by.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
AND at.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
DELETE s,rel,to,by,at;
Also I'm not sure if this c1-[:OF]->s<-[:OF]-c2, c1-[to:TO]->c2 doesn't span up a cross-product.
Just do this:
MATCH (s:Statement{uid:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}),
c1-[:OF]->s<-[:OF]-c2, c1-[to:TO]->c2
WHERE to.statement="e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"
RETURN count(*),count(distinct c1), count(distinct c2), count(distinct to)
to see some numbers.
You also don't seem to use (u) and (ctx) in the result? So might be an option to convert that into a condition. (Have to try), then you might even be able to leave of the with (if the cardinality with distinct is not much smaller than without.
....
WHERE c2-[:AT {at.statement:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}]->()
AND c1-[:BY {statement:"e63cf470-ade4-11e3-bc66-2d7f9b2c7878"}]->()
DELETE s,rel,to,b
HTH
Would love to get the dataset to try it out.

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